Is the Democratic Party Imploding?

As the old saying goes, Angie Schmitt is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. She is not going to turn Republican, but her experience of the reality of Democratic Party rule in Cleveland, Ohio is exemplary. It offers a ground level look of what happens in an American city when leftists take charge.

Better yet, and more indicative still, Schmitt wrote her screed in the Atlantic. When you have lost the Atlantic, you are lost. She opened thusly:

Until recently, I was a loyal, left-leaning Democrat, and I had been my entire adult life. I was the kind of partisan who registered voters before midterm elections and went to protests. I hated Donald Trump so much that I struggled to be civil to relatives on the other side of the aisle. But because of what my family has gone through during the pandemic, I can’t muster the same enthusiasm. I feel adrift from my tribe and, to a certain degree, disgusted with both parties.

The issue is not malice as much as it is raw incompetence. Left-leaning Democrat Schmitt has two children, three and five years old. One was in kindergarten when the city decided to go to remote learning in 2020.

Here is what happened:

I can’t imagine that I would have arrived here—not a Republican, but questioning my place in the Democratic Party—had my son not been enrolled in public kindergarten in 2020.

Late that summer, the Cleveland school system announced that it would not open for in-person learning the first 9 weeks of the semester. I was distraught. My family relies on my income, and I knew that I would not be able to work full-time with my then-5-year-old son and then-3-year-old daughter at home.

Good liberal Democrat that she was, Schmitt initially embraced the new regime. But then, she discovered that a kindergartener could not deal with Zoom learning, point that should have been obvious to the municipal authorities. But, as we shall see, they eventually doubled down on stupid:

Still, I was accepting of short-term school closures. My faith in the system deteriorated only as the weeks and months of remote-learning dragged on long past the initial timeline, and my son began refusing to log on for lessons. I couldn’t blame him. Despite his wonderful teacher’s best efforts, online kindergarten is about as ridiculous as it sounds, in my experience. I remember logging on to a “gym” class where my son was the only student present. The teacher, I could tell, felt embarrassed. We both knew how absurd the situation was.

As we have often noted on this blog, minority children and their families are most clearly damaged by the school lockdowns. They do not have the means to engage their children in remote learning:

The daily gantlet of passwords and programs was a challenge for even me and my husband, both professionals who work on computers all day. About 30 percent of Cleveland families didn’t even have internet in their home prior to the pandemic.

One might ask how it happened that these families voted for the politicians who have been damaging their children, but that would be unkind.

The Democratic politicians who have monopoly control over Cleveland went AWOL. They did not know or did not care or were simply incompetent. 

I kept hoping that someone in our all-Democratic political leadership would take a stand on behalf of Cleveland’s 37,000 public-school children or seem to care about what was happening. Weren’t Democrats supposed to stick up for low-income kids? Instead, our veteran Democratic mayor avoided remarking on the crisis facing the city’s public-school families. Our all-Democratic city council was similarly disengaged. The same thing was happening in other blue cities and blue states across the country, as the needs of children were simply swept aside. Cleveland went so far as to close playgrounds for an entire year. That felt almost mean-spirited, given the research suggesting the negligible risk of outdoor transmission—an additional slap in the face.

Finally, the Republican governor forced the city to reopen schools:

But when the Cleveland schools finally reopened, in March 2021—under pressure from Republican Governor Mike DeWine—they chose a hybrid model that meant my son could enter the building only two days a week.

For Schmitt and her family, it was too little, too late:

My husband and I had had enough: With about two months left in the academic year, we found a charter school that was open for full-time in-person instruction. It was difficult to give up on our public school. We were invested. But our trust was broken.

As for the science about public school closings, Schmitt dutifully researched the question and wanted to question the policy. But she was shouted down, ignored and derided:

By questioning the wisdom of school closures—and taking our child out of public school—I found myself going against the party line. And when I tried to speak out on social media, I was shouted down and abused, accused of being a Trumper who didn’t care if teachers died. On Twitter, mothers who had been enlisted as unpaid essential workers were mocked, often in highly misogynistic terms. I saw multiple versions of “they’re just mad they’re missing yoga and brunch.”

As for the wisdom of school closures, Schmitt brings up an issue that has defined all of this blog’s questioning of the decision-- the balance between risk and reward, the cost of keeping schools open versus the cost of in closing them. She learns what we have been reporting, namely that the harm done by school closings largely outweighs the benefits:

The University of Oxford medical ethicist Euzebiusz Jamrozik said recently on a podcast that ethical public-health responses must rely on a few key principles. One of those is “proportionality,” meaning that the intervention must be proportionate to the risk. A Bloomberg article noted in March that children in the U.S. were about 10 times as likely to be killed in a car crash as by COVID-19. Closing school for more than a year was disproportionate the same way that forbidding parents to drive would have been.

Policy makers must identify not just the benefits and harms of particular strategies, but also the distribution of those benefits and harms.

Schmitt has been chastened:

I keep hoping that Democrats will wake up to the full range of health and social needs Americans are trying to balance right now, but that doesn’t seem likely. A friend now refers to herself as “politically homeless,” and more and more, that’s how I feel as well.

So, the Democratic Party is imploding. It is falling apart before our very eyes. One good reason is that it is being led by a band of imbeciles who do not owe their positions to competence.

As it happened yesterday, Glenn Greenwald, another man of the left who has placed integrity over party loyalty, explained the Democratic Party failure in an essay about the pathetic effort to gin up national hysteria over January 6. I will leave it to you to read his take down of the current media narrative, and pass to his explanation.

Democrats are trafficking the narrative of Republican evil, they are demonizing the opposition, because they have nothing else left to offer:

The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists" are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.

It is not just the QAnon shaman. It is not just Trump and his supporters. Democrats want to extend the taint to all Republicans, to demonize the opposition.

Worse yet, Democrats have been offering nothing of consequence for quite some time now:

Democrats have no governing program on which they can run and win. The complete collapse of the party was temporarily obscured by the once-in-a-generation talent in Barack Obama and the very narrow win in 2020 of a banal, empty septuagenarian, thanks to the incumbent-killing double crisis of a devastating pandemic and economic shutdown. But the edifice of this party collapsed under Obama — “the Whole Democratic Party is Now a Smoking Pile of Rubble,” warned supreme Democratic partisan Matt Yglesias at Vox in 2016 — and it is collapsing once again under Biden. Its only ideologies — neoliberalism, corporatism, militarism — are widely despised failures, but they are imprisoned by their donor base from offering anything else.

And this leads to the following:

A party that does not believe it can win politically often tries to criminalize its adversaries. That is what Democrats did during the Trump years: focused not on defeating his legislative agenda but obsessing on the fantasy that FBI Superman Robert Mueller was going to come and round up Trump and his family members and associates and haul them off to prison. The Democrats’ beloved former CIA Director, NBC News star John Brennan, all but promised that was going to happen two weeks before Robert Mueller closed his investigation by announcing he found no evidence to establish the core crime of conspiring with Russia.

Greenwald concludes:

That is why this Insurrection narrative surrounding 1/6 is so vital to Democrats: it ensures that they are not facing a different ideological camp but rather a band of criminals and domestic terrorists who deserve not a defeat at the ballot box but censorship by a union of state and corporate power, followed by a prison cell.

You might think that these remarks, clearly very wise, are off the mark. But they are not. How does it happen that the people of Cleveland elected a band of total incompetents to public office and allowed them to damage the present and future prospects of their children. The reason is simple: Cleveland Democrats, like blue city Democrats across the nation, persuaded people that Republicans were racist and therefore, anything was better. The anti-racism crusade is designed to persuade people to vote Democratic and to accept the pathetically poor results of Democratic governance, because the alternative is pure unadulterated evil. One might imagine that anyone who would fall for this deserves what he gets, but that would be unkind.